Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Cultural capital is a concept coined by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron to describe a variety of forms of cultural status possessed by students from the upper classes, including extracurricular activities such as attending elite cultural events. This was particularly important as a way of explaining the reproduction of the upper classes in the French education system, which was, and still is, notoriously hierarchical. The term has since passed into common usage across a wide range of disciplines. Cultural capital tries to make sense of the advantages that tend to accrue to the same kinds of people from the same kinds of background. In this sense, it is usually understood in isolation from, for example, exam results or other kinds of academic achievements, which aim to measure native intelligence. Instead, it incorporates modes of comportment such as attitude toward study, information learned outside the school, and the cultural knowledge possessed by the family of the student in question, particularly those regarded as elite (opera, theater, art, classical music, “serious” literature). The concept of cultural capital thus encompasses a large range of activities and habits, which has led some to criticize it for its vagueness and the difficulty of applying it in empirical research. Cultural capital began life as a primarily educational term, and many after Bourdieu used ... log in or subscribe to read full text